A fully coupled aero-elastic simulation technology is developed with enough sophistication to have the features required to perform loads analyses for a variety of wind turbine configurations. Blade and tower are modeled multiple rigid bodies which are connected beam elements to represent a flexibility for their bending and torsional behaviors. AeroDyn which is developed by NREL are chosen for aerodynamic analysis. This is a popular and open code and needs hub-height wind data, full field turbulent wind data and airfoil data to calculate an aerodynamic force. DAFUL, which is a commercial multi-body and structure dynamics analysis tool, is used for multi-body dynamics analysis considering a flexibility of the blade and tower. The interface to perform coupled analysis between these two softwares is developed with a user-subroutine of vector force in DAFUL. Analysis results of a sample model to verify This proposed simulation technology is applied to the analysis of a sample model for verification of the developed program.
When there are no obstacles, the wind has fast and consistent speed. That wind is very useful for wind turbine. A sea provides the good wind and proper environment. A wind power generation can be classified into two groups, onshore wind turbines and offshore wind turbines, and offshore wind turbines can be sorted by the fixed type and the floating type wind turbines. Fixed type wind turbine systems are set up at relatively low depth of water near shore but floating type wind turbines are to be set up at more deep sea. The tower of the fixed type wind turbine is fixed on the ocean floor like onshore type, but the tower of a floating offshore wind turbine is to be fixed on the float and the movement of the float is to be controlled by a mooring system.
